Sara and I are now the proud owners of a brand new Nintendo Wii. I have been a huge (not to mention loyal) Nintendo fan my entire life so this is not entirely surprising. So far we have Zelda and WarioWare in addition to Wii Sports.

The games are a lot of fun. They are easy to learn and enjoyable. The user interface is so simple it makes OS X look downright byzantine by comparison. In short, it is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

Our Wii Friend Code is 4436 0055 7989 8519.

I think I can safely say that a Wii party will be held at Casa de Noland soon.

So... It is time to log things I should have entered into the log a long time ago.

First, the trip to San Francisco. The RSA conference was good if a bit slower this year. I had a better idea about how to get into the best sessions this year so I got to see a lot more. I missed seeing Bruce this year due to a scheduling conflict.

I got to meet my very talented counterpart in Arxan's SF office, Mr Bill Cox. I was also introduced to Sara's west coast relatives, and reintroduced to her grade school friend, Evelyn, who is doing her PhD work in something terribly biological at UCSF.

We were lucky enough to get to stay at the beautiful and historic Westin Saint Francis for 150 USD/day because Sara is a Priceline ninja. The trip also included a visit to golden gate park where we saw the Tea Garden and the de Young Museum

Food highlights included Cafe de la Presse for lunch, dinner with Evelyn at Absinthe, and pizza at Tommaso's. Of course the best meal of the entire trip was the Saint Valentine's Day dinner that Sara treated me to. We ate at Aqua. We each had three delicious courses. Sara chose the Ahi Tuna Tartare followed by the White Sturgeon en Papillotte and Pear Belle Helene for desert. I had Parmesan-Black Pepper Souffle with Sea Urchin and Dungeness Crab to start. This was followed by Maine Skate Wing with Truffle Mushroom Bouillon. For desert I had a Chocolate Tart with Orange Sauce. Needless to say I have the best girlfriend ever.

I also made time to visit Nappa on this trip. We took a bus tour so no one had to drive after drinking. It turned out OK, but it severely limited the number of wineries we were able to visit. Maybe next time we will get a group together and do a limo tour. We visited The Kirkland Ranch, Madonna Estate, and Viansa. The bus also made a morning stop for food at a visitor's center and an early afternoon stop for lunch in Sonoma proper.

I meant to log this weekends trip to Indianapolis as well, but this entry is already too long.

The hard disk drive (hdd) in my computer at work died yesterday. While I am fixing up this one to be usable I should log the necessary actions in case I (or anyone else) needs to do it again.

• Windows Itself
  
  • Open any folder. Choose tools->options. In the view menu check: (1) Display the contents of system folders, (2) Show hidden files and folders, (3) Restore previous folder windows at login. Uncheck: (4) Hide extensions for known file types and (5) Hide protected operating system files.
  • Right click on the task bar. Choose properties. In the Taskbar tab uncheck (6) Group similar taskbar buttons. In the Start Menu tab choose (7) classic start menu. Click the customize button. (8) Click Sort. Uncheck (9) Use Personalized Menus.
  • Delete all the icons in the Start menu by right clicking on them and choosing delete.
• Things to Install
  
  • Launchy
  • WinAmp
  • Taskbar Shuffle
  • Sharp Reader
  • Gaim
  • Gimp
  • WinZip 8.0
  • WinRar
  • Startup Control Panel
  • Acrobat PDF Reader
  • Java Runtime and Dev Kit
  • Microsoft Visual Studio
  • Microsoft Office
  • Microsoft Communicator
  • TightVNC
  • Putty
  • Pscp
  • Mozilla Firefox
    • Adblock Plus
    • Filterset.G Updater
    • User Agent Switcher
    • Session Manager
    • HashColouredTabs+
• Other Configuration
  
  • In any office program: Tools -> Customize -> Options -> Always Show Full Menus
  • Outlook is awful, but it must be used at work. Configuring it to be even remotely useful is very difficult. Some good first steps. (1) View -> Reading Pane -> Bottom. (2) Tools -> Options -> Preferences Tab -> E-Mail Options -> Read all mail in plain text. (3) Tools -> Options -> Mail Format Tab -> Compose all mail in plain text. (4) View -> Arrange By -> Current View -> Hide messages marked for deletion. (5) Tools -> Customize -> Commands Tab -> Edit -> Drag the command "Purge Deleted Messages" into the tool bar up top. (6) Set up your filters using Tools -> Rules and Alerts. There are lots of other work related configuration changes that need to be made, but I won't list them here because they would just help hackers map our internal network.

Saint Patrick's Day happened to fall on a Saturday this year. My lovely and talented girlfriend Sara joined her Irish dancing troupe in the First Annual Greater Lafayette Saint Patrick's Day Parade. I played photographer. You can find the results here.

We spent a large fraction of the day at O'Bryan's Nine Irish Brothers. We danced to the musical stylings of The Bloody Irish Boys, an Irish Punk Rock band from Columbus Ohio. As you can see from the photo my costume seems to have bled over into the work week.